Nile Notes of a Howadji

KARNAK antedates coherent history, yet it was
older the day we saw it than ever before. All
thought and poetry, inspired by its antiquity, had
richer reason that day than when they were recorded, and so you, meditative reader, will have the advantage of this chapter, when you stand in Karnak.
Older than history, yet fresh, as if just ruined for
the romantic.

The stones of the fallen walls are as sharplyedged as the hammer left them. They lie in huge
heaps, or separately standing in the sand; and, regarding the freshness, you would say that Cambyses
and his Persians had marched upon Memphis only
last week, while the adherents of the earthquake
theory of Egyptian ruin, might fancy they yet felt
the dying throes of the convulsion that had shattered these walls.

This freshness is startling. It is sublime. Embalming these temples in her amber air, has not nature so hinted the preservation of their builders'

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